


feels like kaleidoscope

by purplecity



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Comfort, Kissing, Knights - Freeform, M/M, Magic, Mild Blood, Royalty, Trope-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:48:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29380899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplecity/pseuds/purplecity
Summary: Jeno is twelve when Donghyuck disappears.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Lee Jeno
Comments: 20
Kudos: 81
Collections: Challenge #5 - I heard a secret..





	feels like kaleidoscope

**Author's Note:**

> this legitimately would not have been possible without the immense help (and genius brain) of my beta. thank you as always [fist bump]
> 
> [boys in kaleidosphere](https://open.spotify.com/track/6PbmNZ0bm8xhNTufXH6G01?si=2NaLtpxjQ52Q6SRvdwNbOg) by milli

Jeno is twelve when Donghyuck disappears.

The king and queen don't entertain the questions or less than subtle suggestions of the situation. They offer not a single word to the crowd. They're sullen in their dipping chins and sunken cheeks, with a sharpness to their cold gazes. Jeno is in no place to wonder where he's gone and why no one is allowed to know, so he quietly asks himself these things as if a child ever had the right answers.

When he asks, Jeno also cries. He can't help it. It reminds him that he's not here anymore. He muffles it into his pillow so the other boys don't hear him and call him a crybaby. When you're twelve, the truth is ugly and hurts like falling into a thorny rose bush.

  
  


  
  


  
  


Jeno is fifteen when he trains and trains and trains.

There's bumps all over his growing, aching palms. His skin is toughened by scorching heat and clashing bodies, smears of dirt painting him like the bruises decorating knees and elbows. 

A cut across his cheek. Jeno only notices when Mark points it out and he discovers blood after a reluctant touch of his fingertip, guided by Mark's vague navigation. Considering they haven't graduated from sparring with blunt wooden swords yet, he isn't sure what cut him. It could've been a lot of things.

A lot of things can draw blood when you're fifteen. Only some of them hurt, and that's the real danger of it. It's a dilemma. Does Jeno want to bleed and bleed and be numb to his pain, or does he want to feel everything as though he's made of glass?

  
  


  
  


  
  


Jeno is sixteen when the royal knights decide he'll be like them: steel.

The training is more rigorous than ever. He breaks a bone in one spar, then another, and he's still expected to show up and stand his feet in front of his sweaty opponent the next morning.

He gets armor fitted onto him for the first time. It's a wonder how any of those knights can move, let alone fight wars in it—Jeno's arms are locked midair like an awkward scarecrow. Mark punches him square in the chest ("to prove a point") and his silvery breastplate echoes the impact, almost as loud as Mark's high-pitched yelp.

 _Huh. So knights are hollow too,_ is what Jeno thinks of it.

  
  


  
  


  
  


"He is held in a castle," the Queen whispers, her voice dry.

"Guarded by a formidable dragon," the King adds, devoid of emotion.

And valiant soon-to-be-knight Jeno must be the one to slay the beast and bring the prince home.

Jeno, kneeling, nods. _Is this really the truth?_ The Queen blesses him, hand pressed to his bowed head. _For seven years?_ The King tells him the ceremony and sendoff will be tomorrow, an hour after sunrise. Be prepared. It'll be a long journey. _For seven fucking years you act like he doesn't exist?_ Jeno recites his lines of chivalry and honor to the crown and leaves the room with a quiet inferno eating at his heart.

_I could've saved him years ago? And I didn't?_

  
  


  
  


  
  


Fueled by an unspoken rage, Jeno finds the nearest training dummy and slams his fists, the toes of his boots into its wooden body. Like paper, it delicately falls to the ground.

A healing gash on the back of his hand rips open and fresh blood trickles down his clenched fist. He pauses because it's strange to feel his own warmth escape him—and he's never cared before—in the form of a languid and maddening _drip, drip, drip._

Promises are funny things. Jeno used to have one, a glass upturned when Donghyuck vanished from his world. It was empty—he was well aware of it—and he drank from it anyway. Pretended to. Shallow as it was, his knighting buddies couldn't see past it, so it was enough for him. It's been his comfort since he was twelve. The reason why he doesn't have tears for his pillow to soak anymore.

Now for the first time his glass has weight to it. When he brings it to his lips it smells and tastes like his blood. Tastes like iron spikes lodging themselves into his tongue. A teardrop swells at its vile flavor and he doesn't bother wiping it away. He can let it fall this time.

Jeno is nineteen, one day away from knighthood. The glass has shattered and he bleeds. Once he bleeds, he knows he's alive. Red and hot and volatile. Alive with a flurry of emotions that demand he fashion his steel shell and grab his sword and mount his steed and ride into the night.

_Donghyuck. I will find you. And I'm sorry. You've waited so long. But you won't have to anymore._

  
  


  
  


  
  


The kingdom sleeps at night and Jeno bursts through the drowsy haze, wide awake with blood pumping loudly in his ears. 

A faraway village reeks of alcohol and freshly butchered fish guts. There's a sign or two that warns of a mysterious force living deep in the barren lands. Jeno's steed dashes past the half-splintered boards, rendering the words mere blurs of ink. An afterthought.

The decline is gradual. It happens over smooth hours of riding through the darkness. At first Jeno spots merchants on the roadside, snoring beside crackling fires and their carts. Then there's the occasional night-critter. Then there's nothing more—no people, no roads, no trees or birds or crickets to sing a lullaby for him.

Jeno strides on. He'd been told that the castle sits, dark and brooding, somewhere along the trail to the high valleys. Waiting. Expecting. Magnetic. Holding an answer that Jeno desperately burns in his desire to have. Coaxing him to come, armored or not, ready or not to be hurt by the truth all over again.

In the scope of emptiness, Jeno cuts the cold air like a sharp blade thrusted into the void's belly. In the dead silence, Jeno still has his heartbeats, and he wonders if Donghyuck can hear him approaching.

  
  


  
  


  
  


The castle is a desolate hell compared to the grace of the Lee palace—towers built in ashen stone, crooked and biting at the night chill, arched windows barely holding fractured glass. Despite what the barren lands tell of its centerpoint, oddly, Jeno finds himself intruding on a field of purple allium bulbs that circles around the castle. There's a purpose in its formation—a protective loop, growing without rule or rhyme over the years. 

Jeno breaks through it, crushing the delicate bulbs as he confronts the gates.

Jeno's breaths are warm. Greatsword hilt gripped in his trained fist, helmet shielding him from impending doom. There's a great, rumbling roar from behind one of the ivy-strangled towers, and Jeno widens his stance. He knows. He's ready.

Sudden gusts of wind threaten to knock Jeno off his steady feet planted into the ward's parched grass. The field is ashake at an inhuman weight slamming onto the ground. Jeno grips tighter, biting a chunk of his inner cheek. 

It's difficult to see from the narrow slit of his helmet but Jeno recognizes purple scales, veiny wings like a butterfly. How ironic it is to have something so gossamer fitted onto a beast of fire and fangs. The culprit of previous challengers that Jeno perceives as mere bones hiding in hollow armor, scattered across the castle's playing field. 

The dragon's bellow is hostile. Threatening to tear Jeno apart at his seams. He's given a smoke-breathed warning, a chance to flee if he values his life. It's a trick question—Jeno does, but when Donghyuck's adolescent smiles come to mind, he ceases to care about anything else. 

At the top of his lungs, Jeno declares the dragon's imminent demise by his blade. The dragon is unmoving, its golden eye piercing through the little window to Jeno's determined gaze—until it strikes.

Its flames are a deadly purple, beautiful and entrancing, spewed as a cone in Jeno's direction. The sheer heat reaches Jeno before the actual fire that he dodges with a wide leap, sword held with so much grit that it's an extension of his body.

It's Jeno's turn now. The grass yanks at the force of his heels pushing himself off, launching at the snarling dragon. He takes a wide swing with his sword, the dragon's scaly stomach in his eye, but he's not quick enough. The dragon is used to this. It knows exactly what to do.

Jeno's attack is thwarted by a retaliatory swoop of the dragon's alabaster claws. It comes swift and would've speared his body into jagged halves, even with the armor. The dragon does a low grunt as it rotates to follow Jeno's movements. Fangs bared, tendrils of lilac smoke spilling out of its mouth.

 _Donghyuck. Donghyuck._

Jeno's breaking a sweat and the dragon is unrelenting, an iron wall. Knights aren't made to battle dragons. It's a simple name that keeps him swinging, no matter how bleak this encounter looks for him. 

_Wait for me, Donghyuck. Just a little longer._

Another clash. His blade stings and he's fighting as hard as he can but it's going nowhere. The dragon has it blocked with its hand, the tip of unpolished claws drawing sawtooth lines in the steel. Just as Jeno's clenching his jaw and begging his body to _push and push,_ a sparkle in his peripheral sight catches him off-guard. Suddenly allured and curious, he glances up.

It's peculiar. Most of the dragon's scales are blunt, flat, but Jeno can pick out a certain few that beg to differ. Placed in some random—unless it isn't—arrangement, from long neck to face, they're like mirrors reflecting moonlight. Like stars. One sits over there, next to flaring nostrils, and another over here, centered in the contour beneath its eye. Like a constellation. Like a map of the familiar night sky.

What a magnificent creature this is, he thinks, standing so close to the dragon's undulating scales as it takes a fiery inhale and Jeno's own breath is stolen in exchange. How beautiful. 

His blade hesitates. A moment's hesitance is all it takes. The thick of the dragon's tail is hurled into Jeno's side, a force so powerful that his armor bends to its rule on contact and he's sent tumbling a couple meters back.

Jeno's raspy gasp of utter pain is filled with smoke and dust. During the collision, he'd performed an uncontrolled twirl against the ground and the friction had snatched his helmet off, clean, and a misshapen rock cut across his open cheek. 

His body aches. His hands are empty—sword's been flung to the opposite end of the ward like a little toy—except for clumps of wet dirt wedged under his nails. The impact takes a couple deep breaths to recover from and he pushes himself off the ground, though his head still spins.

Jeno stands on his feet despite the throbbing ache spreading from his core. Here he is, armor disfigured where he's most vulnerable and his only weapon flung to the opposite end of the ward. Here he is, facing the dragon's blazing eyes and raised claw—

—what?

 _But…_ Jeno's face goes numb. Pale. Undone. _That's…_

It's the claw. Something is hugging one of the dragon's digits. So thin that Jeno almost misses it, but it's most certainly there. It's woven with too many strings, thick and messy, looping through little shiny rocks that little boy hands dug up from the shore. 

Jeno knows this. It's a bracelet. He put those rocks in his pocket and tied the strings together when he was eight. 

He made that bracelet. 

It was for Donghyuck.

_No…_

Jeno bites on his tongue and tastes blood. This is what he sees: one endless blur of purple and black and red, the wind whispering the ugliest things to his ears as he charges forward. He sees his fists pounding against the purple body. He sees despair.

"You… You hurt him," Jeno bemoans, voice growing husky with every furious syllable. "You hurt him! _You hurt him!_ " 

The dragon's scales are impenetrable. It's almost like punching the training dummy until his knuckles bleed, or like when Mark tried to "prove a point" with his new armor. Every single distraught blow to the dragon is a direct punch sent back to Jeno, funneled to where his armor bends so it's as visceral as can be.

Jeno can't be bothered. Not anymore. The dragon could slice him apart and swallow his pieces and he'd let it happen. He'd encourage it. He's expecting it. If this is where it ends, at least let him meet the same destiny that befell Donghyuck.

Yet it never comes.

The dragon lets out a strangled cry and Jeno clenches his eyes, seething, awaiting his fate—and it doesn't arrive. He isn't being impaled by those fierce claws. He isn't being skewered at the neck by hungry fangs.

The dragon simply lowers his wings, hushed.

Brows twisted in his bewilderment, Jeno frantically looks around himself. The veiny wings are closing in on him and Jeno, for a moment, is convinced that _this_ is where it'll truly happen. And he's easily proved wrong again.

The wings, as broad as they are, make an effort to drape over Jeno's body. To wrap around him with care. They hesitantly flinch when Jeno feels them land against his shoulders as if they're scared of hurting him.

It's… warm. A type of nostalgic comfort prickles under his skin as he's shaded by the impressive wings' embrace. But _why?_ Jeno looks to the dragon, seeking an answer.

To find a bulbous and translucent tear pinched at the edge of the dragon's eye is strange, to say the least. But like the dragon's shimmering scales, the teardrop is a wonderful canvas for moonlight brushstrokes and Jeno, watching, fitting the pieces together, finally has something to fill the void.

"Donghyuck….?"

Jeno has his long-awaited answer.

A blossom of lavender light surrounds the dragon and nearly blinds Jeno with its stark brightness. The wings that had wrapped themselves around Jeno's frame grow weightless, like feathers—like a swarm of butterflies.

Eyes locked wide, Jeno witnesses the massive figure of the dragon melt under the light into hundreds, _thousands_ of butterflies, each one graceful and shining in an array of purples. Jeno's given the softest butterfly kisses, glossy wings tickling him at the cheeks and ears. 

The cloud of butterflies flutters to the air in one graceful swoop, swirling and setting the night sky ablaze. With a dazzling amount of colors and particles it's a confusing sight, as beautiful as it is. Jeno is utterly enraptured by its whimsical magic.

When the butterflies settle and dissipate into the night, Jeno realizes he's holding someone in his arms.

Jeno is quiet, considering, hearing his and Donghyuck's collective breaths. He's grown.

"You…"

It's no use. Jeno can't find the words. Donghyuck is boyish as ever, moles in the exact spots he remembers them, lips curling into the little heart that he always thought was cute. The only change is that Donghyuck's brown locks are dipped in a faded purple (which Jeno quite likes anyway).

Donghyuck's smile lights the world and Jeno is struck. 

"Jeno!" Donghyuck cheerily greets, a voice much higher than Jeno is expecting. He tosses his arms out as if presenting himself proudly, in spite of all the cuts and scars and bruises that litter his skin. Jeno doesn't remember those from when they last saw each other. "Did you miss Hyuckie?"

Donghyuck blinks, waiting, and Jeno bursts into tears.

"W— Wait!" Donghyuck stutters in panic, his eyes rounded and voice lowered to a natural pitch. 

Tentatively, Donghyuck lifts his arms but it's clear he hasn't gotten used to suddenly having human limbs again. Every move is a bit awkward. It'll be a slow journey to relearn everything. 

The journey starts here: relearning Jeno. Reliving what they had.

(And it may not be going as planned.)

"Jeno, wait, I'm sorry! I— I was just joking! I'm not actually still twelve, I just—"

Donghyuck speaks no more beyond that. Jeno's hands cupping his face and a pair of lips crashing onto his promptly cuts him off. At first Donghyuck recoils, surprised, but Jeno's lips are the first taste of home since the fateful day seven years ago. He couldn't ask for anything more.

Donghyuck's eyelids fall, lashes fluttering. Jeno's hands are calloused and rough on his flushed face and it's a gritty sensation that makes him press a delighted smile onto Jeno's welcoming lips. 

"Don't cry," Donghyuck whispers. When he holds Jeno's cheek tenderly, wiping the blood beading its cut, Jeno sighs. "I'm here now. You found me."

Their foreheads inch closer until they're touching, steady. Jeno takes Donghyuck's hand and brings it to his lips—a kiss on the back of his hand, then on the wrist just below his bracelet.

Jeno and Donghyuck are nineteen and together. Donghyuck is himself again, and Jeno is no longer a knight. No need for the armor. No need to pick up his sword.

"Yeah," Jeno says, shutting his eyes. "Thank you for waiting."

**Author's Note:**

> hello! come say hi to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/purpIecity) ^__^


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